Welcome.

Greetings, and thank you for visiting my site. It is a vanity project and a writing closet, a treasure trunk for news, views and reviews, and a place to store my Ps and Qs. It is also a vaulted gallery of cave art, if you will, with stories and articles and the occasional poem to be found in place of bisons and aurochs.

More prosaically, it provides a forum for my writing. As you can see, some of it is quirky – poems, sayings and asides. There are also speeches I wrote during my corporate career, as well as movie and book reviews, profiles and other articles from my past and present sojourn as a journalist. Eventually I plan to post longer pieces, including a memoir, a play and a novel.

I have been writing for a long time, starting in earnest in the 1970s when I was a reporter for the Lerner Newspapers. In my second year on staff I won a Chicago Newspaper Guild award for best feature story of the year, “Senior Suicide: An Avoidable Tragedy?” After six years at Lerner I moved to the copy desk of the Milwaukee Sentinel and then to the Chicago Sun-Times, one of the largest daily newspapers in the country. At the Sun-Times I edited marquee columnists such as Roger Simon, Irv Kupcinet and the legendary Mike Royko. I continued to write the occasional article about music, as well as feature articles, one from the set of Sesame Street, another recounting my Peace Corps experience joining the highly obscure and secret Snake Society in remotest Liberia.

When I received my Masters in Business degree in 1982, I took the momentous leap into the “dark side” (as journalists call it) – corporate communications. Ten years of scrubbing and scribbling away in the backrooms of newspaper factories seemed like enough. I worked at several Fortune 500 companies as writer and editor, managing executive and employee communications, speechwriting and media relations. At the same time I continued to freelance articles, for example “Saturdays With Milton,” about studying viola with the late Milton Preves of the Chicago Symphony, which ran in The Strad Magazine. And I circled back to my roots in community journalism …click to read more…